How the Jazz Record Mart keeps swinging in the age of downloads

Customers mill around the Jazz Record Mart. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)

The traditional record store soon will be a distant memory, its stacks of CDs and LPs rendered obsolete by the Internet, downloading and file-sharing, right?

Wrong – at least in the case of one remarkable Chicago institution, the Jazz Record Mart, which lately has been approaching record sales.

"Business seems to be growing … It's been good news, and it seems to be getting better," says Bob Koester, who owns both the Record Mart and Delmark Records, a revered Chicago jazz-and-blues label.

"If we're doing 90-95 percent (of the business) of the good old days in the middle of a recession, when the recession ends it should be incredible."

By the "good old days," Koester refers to the period about a decade ago, before consumers could share music files without paying the artists and recording companies that produced them.

Even Koester believed that these technological developments could mean the eventual death of his beloved shop, which still unabashedly bills itself as the "World's Largest Jazz and Blues Record Store" (no one has stepped forward to disagree). But a funny thing happened on the way to the store's presumed demise: Business began booming, especially during the past couple of years.

The reasons are many, though the leading one is the saddest.

"We're doing so well (because) there's virtually no competition," says Koester, pointing to the shuttering of the Virgin Megastore and Tower Records several years ago, the recent closing of multiple Borders stores (particularly the mother ship on North Michigan Avenue) and the meager music inventory at Barnes & Noble outlets.

Yet Koester is quick to assert that the implosion of the competition and the ascendance of the Jazz Record Mart are related.

"Too many record stores are dead, and it's because they depended primarily on the Top 10 or Top 40 or Top Whatever and didn't deal in niche marketing," says Koester, 78.

"We've always been a specialist: jazz, blues, a little bit of world music. Usually, we were the low end of the totem pole. Now look at us."

The store rings up approximately $70,000 to $100,000 in sales per month, with roughly 60 percent in CDs and 40 percent in LPs. Posters, calendars and magazines bulk up the take. In-store performances expand the fan base for a shop that employs seven music pros (the label has a staff of five).

Business remains brisk, says Koester, because jazz lovers don't seem to be seduced by downloading, preferring to hold the object of their affections.

"They want a permanent disc," says Koester. "If you download something and put it on your computer and your computer crashes, it's gone. A jazz collector wants to listen to Charlie Parker forever. Then there's the collector aspect – they want to build a library."

The success of the Jazz Record Mart has been an engine for music in Chicago, in part because it underwrites the work of Delmark Records, which Koestner believes never would have survived without the store. In effect, the two businesses long have enriched Chicago's reputation not only as a center for the music but an indispensable disseminator of it.

"For years, the Jazz Record Mart was the magic door through which fans from all over the world could enter the blues culture of the South and West Sides," says Bruce Iglauer, founder of Chicago's Alligator Records. Iglauer launched his career working for Koester at the Mart.

"It is a dream for any fans of blues or jazz records," adds Iglaeur. "As far as I know, there is nothing else like it in the world."

And he's not the store's only distinguished alum. Bluesman Charlie Musselwhite clerked there ages ago, and current Chicago jazzmen such as cornetist Josh Berman and saxophonist Keefe Jackson still work the bins when they're not on tour.

Jazz, says Koester, is "an everlasting music. It's a music you can listen to the rest of your life."

Thanks to the Jazz Record Mart, many will.

The Jazz Record Mart, 27 E. Illinois St.,is open seven days a week; 312-222-1467or jazzmart.com.

Double debut

The emerging French jazz singer Cyrille Aimee made her Chicago debut Monday night at Andy's Jazz Club, where she also performed for the first time with a big band. She arrived with significant credentials, including a spot as finalist in last year's Thelonious Monk Vocal Competition. Appearing with Jeff Lindberg's Chicago Jazz Orchestra, Aimee lived up to advance billing, her voice light but lithe, her scat singing deft and consistently musical, her improvisations never less than creative. Someone should book her for a Chicago engagement of her own – soon.

To read more from Howard Reich on jazz, go to chicagotribune.com/reich